Sebastian Sauer

April 26, 2017

Reading time ~5 minutes

Many tools exist for academic writing including the notorious W.O.R.D.; but many more are out there. Let’s have a look at those tools, and discuss what’s important (what we expect the tool to deliver, eg., beautiful typesetting).

Typical tools for academic writing

MS Word: A “classical” choice, relied upon by myriads of white collar workers… I myself have used it extensively for academic writing; the main advantage being its simplicity, that is, well, everybody knows it, and knows more or less how to handle it. It’s widespread use is of course an advantage.

TeX: The purist’s choice. The learning curve can be steep, but its beauty and elegance of typesetting if unreached.

Overleaf, Authorea: Web-based apps that make it easy to enjoy modern functionality by making the entry hurdle as low as possible. These riches do not come for free; commercial organizations would like to see some return of investment.

Full: With the “full” approach I refer to a blended version of several tools, mainly:

Markdown: Markdown is a simple variant of markup languages such as HTLM or LaTeX. Its marked feature is its simplicity. In fact, it can be learned in 5 minutes (whereas TeX may need 5-50 years, some say…).

Google Docs: Easy, no (direct) costs, comfortable, but some features are lacking - There’s no easy for citations. In addition, some say intellectual rights are transferred to Google by using G Docs (I have no clue whether that’s true).